Episode 1476: Multisport Sabermetrics Exchange (Hockey and Cricket)
Date December 27, 2019 Summary In the second installment of a special, seven-episode series on the past, present, and future of advanced analysis in non-baseball sports, Ben Lindbergh talks to Evolving-Hockey.com’s Josh and Luke Younggren about hockey and then writer, commentator, and team analyst Jarrod Kimber about cricket (57:13), touching on the origins of sabermetrics-style analysis in each sport, the major challenges, big breakthroughs, and overturned misconceptions, the early adopters, the cutting-edge stats and tech, the level of acceptance within the game, the effects on the spectator experience, the parallels with baseball, and more. Topics * Interview with Josh and Luke Younggren * How Josh and Luke got into hockey * History and ease of hockey analytics * Corsi, Fenwick, and breakthroughs on shot attempts * Expected goals and analysis borrowed from other sports * Los Angels Kings and Chicago Blackhawks as early adopters * Debunking the myths of blocking shots and the stay at home defenseman * Defining a statistical edge in hockey * Jay Bouwmeester and Jared Spurgeon * Difficulty of goalie analytics * Lack of player and coach adoption * Changes to team construction * Implementation of player tracking * Discovering issues with NHL shot location data * Interview with Jarrod Kimber * History and ease of cricket analytics * Wearable technology * Australian cricket team * Impact of Moneyball * Innovation of and changes to game structure * Batting to new parts of the field as a result of analytics * Impact of national secrecy on data availability * Broadcast technology Intro Neil Young, "When Worlds Collide" Interstitial Guided by Voices, "Your Cricket is Rather Unique" Outro Jethro Tull, "Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day" Notes * In Episode 537 Ben and Michael Baumann talked with Sean McIndoe about the state of sabermetric analysis in hockey. * Josh and Luke rate hockey's ease of analysis a 3/10. One of the things making it so difficult is the great variety of strength states in the game (5 on 5, power players, overtime, etc.). Statistically each has to be treated like a separate game. * During the 2007-08 season the NHL introduced play by play data and using in-arena employees tracked the location on the ice of key events within the game. * NHL teams are exceptionally secretive so it is hard to know exactly what each team is doing with analytics. The Carolina Hurricanes have been public about their use of analytics. * Josh and Luke say that there is so much noise in hockey, a large statistical edge only gets close to 60% or so. The best player at winning faceoffs in the NHL this season has won 58% of them. * Analyzing goalie impact and skill is near impossible Josh and Luke say. Most goalie careers are not long enough to get a significant sample. * Jarrod says that cricket has many events you can quantify but that it is much harder to predict. He rates it a 5.5/10 in terms of ease of analysis. * Cricket teams first used batting average in the late 1700s but did not calculate any other statistics until the late 20th century. * Because the cricket ball is not replaced often, and matches can last for several days, the quality of the field and ball deteriorate during the course of the match and affect play. * The Australian cricket team was a key innovator for analytics in cricket in the early 2000s. The Australian coach John Buchanan was approached by eccentric cricket fan Krishna Tunga, who had recorded every ball delivered in every cricket match he could find, covering over 1000 matches. Tunga recorded his information in a Word document (!). * Much of the early data was generated by students in the United States who were desperate for cricket play-by-play and set up a chat room site where anybody could connect and get the current game state. Since this was updated after every ball, this inadvertently created a database of every ball played. The information was later collected on a Web site called cricinfo, which resourceful people would scrape for data. * Jarrod estimates that around 25 of 300 professional/national cricket teams use some kind of analytics. * The West Indies team experienced a renaissance when Twenty20 cricket was introduced. Twenty20 is a faster version of cricket that rewards aggressive batting: Imagine a version of baseball in which a half-inning ended after three outs or ten strikes, whichever comes first. The West Indies team relied heavily on hitting sixes (the cricket equivalent of home runs), which their analytics revealed was well-suited to the new version of cricket. * There were historically parts of the cricket field which batsmen did not hit to. For example, a ball can legally be hit straight backward, but the tactic was not employed until relatively recently due to a mix of unwritten rules, perceived risk, and difficulty of execution. * Progress in cricket analytics is hampered by the fact that each country closely guards its data. This makes collaboration and peer-review difficult to impossible. * Some cricket leagues have very short seasons, two months or so. The team composition can vary wildly from year to year, and the league may dissolve on short notice. * Limited-overs cricket is a weak-link sport with respect to bowling (pitching), but a strong-link sport with respect to batting. (See Episode 1399 for discussion of weak-link versus strong-link.) By analogy, suppose baseball games were ten innings with no DH or substitutions, and each team was required to use five pitchers for two innings each. You want to use five excellent pitchers (even if they are bad hitters and fielders), because one weak pitcher can lose the game. Links * Effectively Wild Episode 1476: Multisport Sabermetrics Exchange (Hockey and Cricket) * Evolving Hockey * Evolving Hockey's Patreon Page * Younggren's NHL WAR model * Stat Shot by Rob Vollman * The NHL's Analytics Awakening by Sean McIndoe * The Conquests and Casualties Of The NHL's Analytics Boom by Neil Paine * NHL Coaches Are Pulling Goalies Earlier Than Ever by Noah Davis and Michael Lopez * Inaccurate shot location data sends ripples through hockey analytics by Michael Wagar * The NHL Has Fixed the Incorrect Shot Locations by Bryan Bastin * Why doesn't cricket have proper metrics for fielding? by Jarrod Kimber * 'Analysis is easy. The trick is turning it into info players can use' by Jarrod Kimber * Why aren't T20 teams scoring bigger more often? by Jarrod Kimber * Do right-left pairs at the crease work? It's complicated by Jarrod Kimber * 'Smash Factor': New Technology to unlock secrets of batting by Ben Horne * Boxing Day test to feature 'world first' TV technology by NZ Herald * Wezen-Ball: Hot Spot in the Park by Larry Granillo * Beltre's disputed groundout video Category:Episodes Category:Guest Episodes